Just ONE

There was a woman who came upon an entire beach filled with starfish which had been washed ashore by a terrible storm. She began the delicate process of placing them back into the water, one-by-one. 

A man came along and asked a pointed question, "Why are you doing this? They will all be dead soon. There's just one of you, and there are thousands upon thousands of starfish along miles and miles of beach. Even if you worked all day you wouldn't even save a small percentage of the starfish. In fact, your efforts won't even make a difference."

The woman picked up another starfish, placed it in the water and said, "It made it a difference to that one." 

We may only send one starfish back to the ocean, but it's going to mean a lot to that starfish. 
Our family has chosen to start with ONE.  

The Democratic Republic of the Congo by the numbers:

• DRC is located in central Africa and comes in as the 3rd largest country in Africa. 
• Population is 75 million - half of that population is under the age of 15.
• 15% of the children in the DRC under the age of 18 are orphans, about 770,000 of them orphaned through AIDS alone.
• War and conflict have led to the death of 5.4 million Congolese people since 1998.
• 80% of Congolese people live on less than 50 cents a day.
• 45% have NO access to safe drinking water.
• 37% have NO access to medical care.
• 48% of children have NO access to school or an education.
• Life expectancy is 50 years.  
• 146 out of every 1,000 children will die before the age of 5.
• There are 5 MILLION orphans living in the DRC alone.

Here is a video of the beautiful landscape and wildlife in the DRC:

This international adoption thing can be a long road filled with ups and downs and lots of paperwork and waiting!  Here's where we are on that road...

We put in an application to an agency in early October. They are very knowledgeable and experienced with adoptions from the DRC.  We were accepted into the program and are working on getting our contract settled.  We have an amazing agency here in Colorado that will be doing our homestudy (very long, in-depth study of our family to make sure we are suitable to adopt).  We will be starting our homestudy as early as next week!!

Once we have our homestudy approved, we can start applying for grants.  The homestudy process takes approximately 3-6 months.  We are hopeful that we will be able to fund a good portion of the adoption through grants!

If we had all of the funds we needed in our bank account today (we don't), we could be in the DRC picking up our babe in as little as 8-9 months!  We are anticipating that it will take us a little longer to get funding.        

What next??  LOTS of prayer, LOTS of paperwork and LOTS of patience!!

We cannot wait to meet this little ONE!!

Adventure is Out There!!

Little Family, Big God

Little Family, Big God. I suppose “little” is relative, right? I mean, a hundred years ago, a little family meant they only had six kids. Nowadays when you have three or four kids, it seems more like a big family.

And that brings us to the purpose of starting this blog. We want to document our journey to bring home a new little person to our family. “Bring home?” you ask. Don’t you mean “have?” And why so many “quotations”? Just because. And no. We mean BRING HOME. We’re done with these kids that all look alike. I mean, come on, we have two Jody clones and an Alison clone. Enough with that, already. Jeez!

If you haven’t figured it out by now (heaven help you), we have decided to adopt! We are beyond excited and scared and reticent all at the same time.  We keep being led back to God’s word.  James 1:27, calls us to “look after orphans and widows in their distress.”  We know that these little ones are so close to the Father’s heart and we have arms to hug and beds for them to sleep in and love enough to care for them.  Will we do it perfectly? Uh, no!  Have you met our three kids?  But, we will do it with the help of the Father who accepts us as totally imperfect, loves us, and adopts us into His family. 

Called

This has happened quickly but also started a long time ago. For Jody, it started at age 17, in a village in Mexico where God broke his heart and he fell in love with people that didn’t look anything like him, or speak the same language as him. For Alison, it started as a little girl when all she ever wanted to be was a Mommy!

Congo

We have gone back and forth whether we should adopt internationally or domestically, adopt from Uganda or Congo or South America or Puerto Rico or Denver. A series of thoughts and events have led us to adopt from Congo or the Democratic Republic (that’s never a good start to name your country) of The Congo, or whatever you want to call it. It’s that giant country in Africa where kids are orphaned by the millions (5 million to be exact) and adopting from there can literally save someone’s life.   

Crazy?

We don’t think so. Although this is probably the toughest decision we’ve ever made, we know it will be the most rewarding.

Commit
Inasmuch as we know that we are being called to do this, we are fully aware that we cannot do this alone!  We need friends and family and even people we do not know yet to come along side us and support us.  We need a lot of prayer!  Please commit to pray for us during this journey and for this child waiting for us in Congo! 

“I always questioned whether I was ready to adopt and then I realized no child was ready to be an orphan.” - Author Unknown